Year over year scientists continue to unearth various treasures from not only humans but the natural world’s colored past. The physical remains of different organisms, long forgotten objects that range from painted vases to primitive tools, and periodically scientists even discover the remnants of our past social life. Roads, villages, cemeteries, and locations where humans practiced agriculture. Through these discoveries our species gets further access to worlds that may have been up to this point totally isolated from our collective memory. We are able to glean information on how our ancestors lived, related, and molded the world around them through their physical labor. Physical labor being a necessary part of the species existence is an unbroken link that connects modern man to his most ancient progenitors. These discoveries aren’t solely important because they scratch an intellectual itch or our knowledge for our lost past. They are also a testament to the fact that our contemporary mode of production is not a universal or an eternal part of human societies no matter how much our dim witted enemies suggest otherwise. In tens of thousands of years what will these future scientists unearth from our current society? At the very minimum they are bound to find an abundance of chemical pollutants that our current crop of geniuses have dubbed “Forever Chemicals”

PFAS aka Forever Chemicals - Per - and polyfluoroalkyl substances are synthetic chemical compounds that first appeared on the world market in 1938 with the invention of Teflon. PFAS are useful compounds that can make specific goods more resistant to heat, water, oil, and grease. They are used in the production of commodities across a plethora of different industries. These products range from food packaging to furniture, and even in personal cosmetics. They are in some form, involved in practically every industry across the globe. The utility of these chemicals is outshined though, by both their negative effect on human health but also their amazing ability to bioaccumulate.

Research since the 1970s has shown that PFAS over a certain threshold have a negative impact upon our bodies functioning. That includes higher rates of different cancers, lower fertility, and developmental defects in children amongst a myriad of other ill effects. One could imagine that in a “rational” society when these negative effects were found, persons would move mountains and rivers to stop the production of such an evident problem. Global capitalist society, and its constituents, is not a “rational” one though. Or at the very least its number one raison d’être is to accumulate, and at any social cost. If it can be profited upon no matter the deleterious effects it is accepted. The booming tobacco, alcohol, and drug trade is a wonderful example of this. While PFAs in an economic sense are not a significant part of global chemical production, they are still a profitable and useful one. The estimated profit margin sits at around 16%, and the percentage they make up of global chemical production is only 5%. Due to the necessity of a ROI (as the primary goal) imposed on enterprises within capitalist production our social web ignores the reality of harm done to both man and nature. This is happening day after day in our current world, and it has been a byproduct of capitalism since its very inception. For an example of the former let us give a quotation from Engels in his work on the Condition of the Working Class in England.

“Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.”

The conditions these workers found themselves within may have primarily been alleviated within the West but is still an everyday reality for the proletariat in the slums of Africa, and Asia.

For an example of the latter, ignoring the chemical pollution we are writing about in this very article. We need only reference the fact that since the 1970s the effect of capitalist production on the global climate has been quietly accepted by segments of the bourgeoisie. There is a very large contingent who wish to downplay or ignore these facts so as to prevent the interference of state actors in limiting their ability to accumulate freely. There is even a part of the bourgeoisie who knows that global temperatures are rising, and that this crisis will lead to crop failure, heat deaths, and masses of refugees but in the face of this exclaims this moment is going to be for the “Cooling” industry a profitable one!

“Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.”

What lucky profiteers. As we rush further into ecological devastation we are glad the bourgeoisie has something to look forward to.

Continuing the above on bioaccumulation, bioaccumulation is the term used to describe the process by which PFAS (amongst other compounds) become saturated in the “natural world”. This accumulation can take place in the Earth itself ie soil, the air we breathe, water systems, and the animals we consume to fuel our ever engulfing economy. Since these ingredients in our capitalist system are molecularly very stable they can accumulate readily over time. Of course, like all other physical matter there is a move towards deterioration but the effects on water supplies, food chains, and even the human body will be with us for a long while. Especially so with a society that is producing these and other pollutants that has no ability to seriously root them out. The estimated cost for the removal of PFAS from soil alone is in the trillions. Capitalist society is totally unable to take on this herculean task, and the species will only be able to seriously redress the damage done to ourselves and our planet when we have smashed private property, and subjected technology and production to the life plan of the species – Communism. Communism, a world historic movement arising from the very foundations of this crumbling society is “the real movement to abolish the present state of things”. This movement is the only answer to the question of how humans can in an ever more effective way resolve the contradiction between man’s existence and nature.

“This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man”

To give the devil his due, there has been some push within the EU, and the USA to ban these chemicals but they have either targeted specific ones (which are readily replaced by a similar compound that isn’t banned) or there has been an inability to seriously yank them out of the supply chain. We will see if PFAs will go the way of CFCs, leaded gasoline, or asbestos but tension between health, and profit will only cease when a revolutionary wave breaks the dam that is class society.

There is practically no place on Earth that is untouched with this pollution. PFAS have been found in the Arctic with the belief that migrating birds that are preyed upon are the culprit. Even if the polar bears ice caps aren’t melting, they would still be infected with the toxic waste of capital.

From the Arctic to Minneapolis and Malaysia no one or no thing is safe from the “externalities” created by capital. Notwithstanding the fact that even with issues that affect all classes, the international proletariat takes the brunt of damage. From the workers that manufacture the chemicals to the ones who work in landfills where all our great works go to rot. Proletarians are the segment of humanity that are poisoned by these toxins more than their compatriots working on Wall Street, or at the local law firm. The workers who cannot afford to buy organic vegetables or “humanely” raised meat, or enough wages to purchase water filters that purify whatever filth comes out of their tap.

These chemicals do have a use within the pharmaceutical realm, and “green” technology. There are actual hard questions that have to be answered in our attempt to reproduce our existence as a species. We will have to use, produce, and consume things that do have a negative effect on the species health under a non class society. The issue at hand is that with the anarchy of capitalist production, it can not only not ask these questions on any serious terrain, its very nature doesn’t allow it to answer them because the sole motivating force is profit.

This issue of social vs monetary cost is one that will be done away with in our future society. Under a centralized and rational mode of production humans will forgo the system that puts everything and everyone on a balance sheet. With its attempts to maximize profit and ignore the cost to the species. The rationality of the capitalist mode of production has it not only undermining itself within the process of production by being compelled to do away with its very source of profit – variable capital. It also has no issue with pillaging and polluting the world it exists upon in its unquenchable thirst for more. The communist struggle is the only hope for a future for an environment worth living in. A struggle that’s existence is born out of the antagonisms within class society, and reaches its apex with a mass revolutionary movement and the International Communist Party at the helm. Only with the destruction of capitalist society, and the destruction of all classes as a social relationship will the “workers” of the future be able to breathe easily.